New Book: Fairy Tales With a Black Consciousness: Essays on Adaptations of Familiar Stories

Fairy Tales With a Black Consciousness: Essays on Adaptations of Familiar Stories edited by Vivian Yenika-Agbaw, Ruth McKoy Lowery and Laretta Henderson was released earlier this month although it's availability with various online retailers is inconsistent. This book helps to fill a largish hole about Black (as in races with dark skin tones, and no, not just African American because that is more limited) interpretations of fairy tales. I haven't read the book yet--don't own a copy yet--but I am intrigued and interested in it.

Book description:

The all new essays in this book discuss Black cultural retellings of traditional, European fairy tales. The representation of Black protagonists in such tales helps to shape children's ideas about themselves and the world beyond--which can ignite a will to read books representing diverse characters. The need for a multicultural text set which includes the multiplicity of cultures within the Black diaspora is discussed.

The tales referenced in the text are rich in perspective: they are such as Aesop's fables, Cinderella, Rapunzel and Ananse. Readers will see that stories from Black perspectives adhere to the dictates of traditional literary conventions while still steeped in literary traditions traceable to Africa or the diaspora.

About the Editors

Vivian Yenika-Agbaw is an associate professor of language and literacy education at Penn State University, University Park. Ruth McKoy Lowery is an associate professor in the College of Education at the University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida. Laretta Henderson is an associate professor at the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

You can preview the book's first pages including the introduction on Amazon so I captured a screen shot of the Table of Contents. It is a refreshing and diverse collection of essay topics so I am even more intrigued. Some I expected--such as Pinkney (how about I link to both father and son) and Rachel Isadora--and some I didn't expect because there hasn't really been enough scholarship in this particular area yet. (On the other hand, some collections with different themes, say fairy tale and film, are all too predictable these days. I can almost give you the essay themes before I look inside the book. Disney's Snow White, check. La Belle et la Bete, check. Company of Wolves, check. Etc.)

Table of Contents: